Shiojiri: Takagi Toranosuke Watching a Whaling Fleet, no. 31 from the series The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō

Shiojiri is one of the sixty-nine stations of the Kisokaidō road. Kuniyoshi’s imagination connects the land-locked town with the ocean through the sound of the place-name, crafting an elaborate linguistic-visual pun. The first part of the place-name, Shiojiri, sounds like “salt” or “seawater” (shio). The second part, “jiri,” refers to shiri, meaning “bottom,” and is translated visually into the squatting naked boy in the bottom-center.

The samurai and hero Takagi Toranosuke, dressed in travel attire, stands on a bluff looking out to the sea, where fishing boats surround a whale. Toranosuke’s reputation as a monster slayer suggests that he is about to fight the whale. In other works by Kuniyoshi, Toranosuke is depicted in an underwater struggle with a creature called a “river tiger” (kawatora, also known as kappa). Although no literary sources have been found, there may be a related story in which the supernatural water monster is replaced by a whale—less unusual, but far more impressive.